CydiaTweak:AddAColoredTintToTheiOSUserInterfaceWithUIColors

Apple’s iOS user interface (UI) is nice, but it’s not blue enough. Or is it that it’s not green enough, or purple enough? With one upcoming jailbreak tweak, you can decide how to enhance the appearance of Apple’s mobile OS by adding a system-wide colored tint to its UI. Called UIColors, the package should be available in the Cydia Store soon and will retail at $1.49 – but iOS device users are warned: this new jailbreak tweak unfortunately comes with its share of problems.

After UIColors has been installed on your iOS device, you’ll be able to configure the package from within a dedicated preferences pane that’s added to the Settings app. Here, you can blacklist iOS applications installed on your iOS device, and you can set primary and secondary colors for the jailbreak tweak. The primary color you select will be used for navigation bars, the iOS keyboard, and other larger sections of the mobile OS.

The secondary color, however, is used for toggles, buttons, sliders, and other more minor areas of Apple’s iOS. It’s also possible to configure a user-defined text color from within the Settings app, too.

Colors can be set using hue, saturation, and brightness sliders; you can pick out a rough estimate of the color you’re looking for before tweaking it using these sliders, too, which makes the process easier. However, it’s not all good news; iDownloadBlog, which published a hands-on preview of UIColors in advance of the jailbreak tweak’s release, explains how the package sadly falls short:

The last two settings that you’ll find within UIColors’ preferences are toggles—one for SpringBoard colors, and an overall kill switch. The SpringBoard toggle is supposed to turn off the UIColors effects for things like Notification Center and Control Center, though, I found that this toggle didn’t work in the copy that I was given to test. The overall kill switch did work as expected, though I still was presented with some residual effects on my Lock screen passcode and in a few additional areas.

Combined with a handful of bugs which are littered throughout the package, this renders UIColors a jailbreak tweak that iOS device users may actually wish to avoid.

Though it sounds promising on paper, folks looking to purchase this package should do so with the knowledge that the experience on offer is buggy and imperfect. “Take the Messages app for example; the chat bubbles look like they’ve been cut out and glued on to (sic) the screen they stand out so badly,” iDownloadBlog adds.

As mentioned, you’ll soon be able to pick up UIColors for $1.49 in the Cydia Store. But do proceed with caution.